Al Gore Is Not Giving Up

Al Gore is richer and skinnier than ever, 14 years out of the White House, a tech titan with elder statesman clout, whose disdain for politics in the capital where he lived most of his life has only grown with each year he’s lived away from it. Sure, this new Gore has a great life, what with a net worth well over the $200 million mark following the sale of his Current TV network to Al Jazeera last year, that seat on the Apple board and his starring roles with two investment companies that tout their environmentally friendly business styles: London-based Generation Investment Management and Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He lives well too, between his 20-room, $4 million home in Nashville’s tony Belle Meade neighborhood and a separate apartment in San Francisco’s St. Regis luxury hotel residences.

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But even in his fabulously wealthy, I’m-not-a-Washingtonian-anymore phase, Gore is still a policy wonk, of course. He may be a trendy, 50-pound-lighter vegan these days, and wear the all-black uniform of the Silicon Valley gurus who have become his peers. But the former vice president still geeks out when talking about the “cost-down curve for photovoltaic electricity,” his solar-powered houseboat and the infuriating refusal of the news media and the Republican Party to acknowledge the climate change gorilla in the room.

And the new Al Gore is just as steamed as the old Al Gore about the lack of clear progress in combating global warming, a failure that clearly eats at him. When I ask Gore in a two-hour interview in his Nashville office—the longest he’s given since last summer—how he would describe his job, he says, “I want to catalyze the emergence of a solution to the climate crisis as quickly as possible. Period.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, he is much less eager to discuss the disappointments of why that is so during the presidency of a fellow Democrat who subscribes to Gore’s views on the urgency of the climate crisis – never mind his own failure to galvanize more action despite the recognition of a Nobel Prize and even an Oscar award for his climate proselytizing. And then there’s the awkward fact of his current low profile, which even Gore friends and allies tell me is very much by design.

If the old rap on Gore was that he was too boring, too stiff to succeed at the highest levels of politics—at one point, it was hard to find a mention of the former vice president’s name without the word “wooden” closely nearby—the new complaint, even from Gore’s ostensible allies, is that he’s too polarizing a figure to lead the movement against climate change, a lament I’ve heard in numerous recent interviews.

“I don’t think he’s taken seriously as the spokesman, certainly by no one in the middle,” a former House Democrat with battle scars from the last decade’s climate change debates told me. “He’s preaching to the choir. He’s a common scold.” Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democratic senator, says any politician with a background like Gore’s is bound to be a problematic face of the climate fight. “I’d vote for a scientist,” she said in an interview. “He may be a statesman, but I think once a politician, always a politician in the eyes of many.”

The charge leaves him cold. “It’s not about me. And I’ve never tried to make it about me,” Gore, who turned 66 last month, insists. “I think that whoever puts his head up above the trenches and says ‘We’ve got to do this’ is going to attract the ire of people who don’t want to do it,” he says. “And there are plenty of them.”

“I think that’s a big statement about who he is,” says Carol Browner, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who is close to Gore. “Lots of people in our business would care a lot more about being on the front page.”

Whether by choice or design, Gore is clearly working hard to not make it about him. He rarely grants interviews, preferring to lobby President Obama and world leaders in private (he tells me he has “no complaints about any lack of access” to the White House). When Senate Democrats invited Gore to brief them last December, he did it behind closed doors at one of their weekly luncheons in the Capitol, rather than in televised committee hearings, like the ones he headlined in 2007 and 2009. He skipped the 2012 Democratic National Convention altogether. And much of his attention these days is clearly on his booming business (though conservatives love to bash him for that too, taunting him for getting rich off going green).

“I think he’s channeled some of his political instincts into business now,” says Jon Meacham, the former Newsweek editor who published Gore’s most recent book. As for the complaint that Gore’s monetizing his climate fight for personal gain, Bill Daley, the former White House chief of staff, responds: “The fact that Al Gore invests in companies that may be able to help with climate change is somehow evil? In every other format those people would cheer someone who did that.”

But it is also indisputably true that Gore’s global warming quest has produced few clear successes. Public opinion polls show Americans repeatedly rank climate change near the bottom of their list of priorities for the country. Greenhouse gas emissions have continued their upward march, interrupted only by the 2008 recession. Repeated legislative defeats in Washington and more than two decades of largely fruitless international negotiations have left many in the environmental movement searching for new strategies, and new leaders. And now the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the same U.N.-backed group that shared Gore’s 2007 Nobel Prize, says the planet won’t be nearly as habitable by the end of this century if significant changes aren’t made – and soon – in how we get our energy.

Darren Samuelsohn is a senior policy reporter for Politico who has covered climate change for 14 years. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.